1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a parcels conveyor for transporting general cargo, such as parcels, boxes, luggage, and of the kind having a number of rollers forming a supporting surface for the cargo to be transported.
The manual handling of general cargo, such as parcels, boxes, luggage, at the delivery end of a parcels conveyor is known to be a difficult, demanding job which has been shown to lead to frequent occupational injuries among personnel.
The problem is particularly acute in operations such as the loading of luggage into the cargo compartment of an aircraft. Normally, a parcels conveyor is placed outside the door of the cargo compartment, on which the luggage is transported from or to the door. An assistant inside the aircraft must then take each suitcase off the conveyor and ensure that it is placed correctly in the compartment, without any kind of mechanical assistance in the compartment itself. As the cargo compartment has a rather limited floor-to-ceiling height, the assistant wil often have to work in an awkward position or even a crouching position. Obviously, this work overloads the assistant's back and demands furthermore strong arms. For this reason, the luggage cannot always be treated with the necessary care and this difficult job very often takes a relatively long time to perform.
As the health authorities are now increasingly examining the causes of workplace injuries which could possibly be declared occupational injuries, a solution to the problem must therefore be found.
2. Discussion of the Related Technology
A parcels conveyor is known from U.S. Pat. No. 2,494,302. The conveyor known from the said U.S. Patent belongs indeed to the normal category of conveyors with cargo supporting rollers on the top side, and, especially on vertically adjustable legs, transport rollers on the underside. This well-known conveyor was primarily developed to create a type of in-between conveyor linked to one or two normal rectilinear and/or curved conveyors and in this situation to create a "shape-fixed" junction between these conveyors, for which reason each unit in this conveyor is indeed linked by means of pivots, but also has steady connecting links from one under to the other, in order to achieve a shape-fixed junction.